Call centers are known in which incoming calls are routed to one of a plurality of agents. For example, the call center might provide help desk facilities for a particular group of products and customers who are able to call in and be allocated to an agent who has the necessary skills to deal with his or her query. Each agent has one or more skills, for example, a particular agent has knowledge about sales for product X and about technical support for product Y. An incoming call is received and information from that call is used by the call center, together with information about the agents, in order to route the incoming call to an agent with the appropriate skill. For example, an interactive voice response system (IVR system) may be used to find out what type of agent skill is required. Associated with each skill is a queue into which incoming calls are placed until an agent with that skill becomes available.
More recently, multi-media call centers have become available. These types of call center are able to receive incoming contacts or calls in a plurality of different types of medium. For example, as email, fax, chat, web-based and other types of contact. Thus, the term “call centers” as used herein is not intended to be restricted to situations in which telephone calls are made to the center. Other types of call or contact are also envisaged, such as email, fax, SMS, chat, web access and any other suitable method of contact including conventional telephone calls and voice over internet protocol telephone calls. Similarly, the tern “call” as used herein is not intended to be restricted to conventional telephone calls but includes contacts made by email, fax, voice over IP and any other suitable medium.
As mentioned above, associated with each skill is a queue into which incoming calls are placed until an agent with that skill becomes available. Typically further subdivision of these queues is made such that for a particular skill, there is one queue for each possible type of medium. For example, the skill may involve knowledge of product X with respect to sales and the possible types of medium may be email, telephone, and web-based contacts. In that case, three queues are available for the particular skill, one for each of the types of medium.
An ongoing problem faced by contact centres relates to management of incoming contacts such that those are dealt with as quickly and effectively as possible. Often the queues referred to above build up and end user's experience significant waiting times before reaching a call center agent. This leads to dropped calls and customer dissatisfaction.
An object of the present invention is therefore to provide a multi-media contact center which overcomes or at least mitigates one or more of the problems mentioned above.
Further benefits and advantages of the invention will become apparent from a consideration of the following detailed description given with reference to the accompanying drawings, which specify and show preferred embodiments of the invention.